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Delacourt: Robocalls enough to turn people off politics

OTTAWA—As part of its rebranding effort, the newly renamed Canadian Museum of History is looking for suggestions from the public.

“What would you put in your national history museum? What stories would you tell?” the website asks.

If you were trying to find a way to make people mad or cynical about politics, it would be hard to find a better medium than the irksome telephone, writes Susan Delacourt. (TORONTO STAR FILE PHOTO)

Here’s one suggested artifact: the humble telephone.

Thanks to telemarketers and political robocalls, it may well be on its way to obsolescence as a tool of salesmanship for products and political parties.

Very soon, we may find it hard to imagine a time when the ring of a telephone was a cheery, welcome interruption in the life of the typical Canadian household.

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How much do Canadians hate telephone sales? The federal do-not-call list tells the story: more than 11 million numbers have been added to the register in fewer than five years ago.

The latest report from the do-not-call registry shows that tens of thousands of Canadians were lodging complaints about telemarketers in the last few months of 2012 — between 8,000 and 10,000 each month from October to December.

The webpage also links to reports of a steady progression of fines being levied every year against violators. Curiously, perhaps, many of the offenders are in the cleaning business: steam cleaners, air-duct cleaners, carpet shampooers. Presumably, the fines fall into the category of cleaning up their own act.

Political parties are not subject to the do-not-call list. (Nor, it should be noted, are pollsters and media companies such as the Toronto Star.)

And so, much as we may hate the telephone annoyance, the political parties continue to support a thriving business in “robocalling” — those mass, automatic-dial efforts to make contact with would-be supporters.

This tactic, however, may be reaching the end days of its utility as well.

It’s not just the ongoing investigation by Elections Canada into fraudulent calls on and around voting day in 2011. By the time the next election rolls around, we should be able to hope that Elections Canada will have gotten to the bottom of the roughly 1,300 complaints about misleading phone calls in the 2011 campaign.

But long before any future law comes into force, robocalls may become extinct because of a far more practical consideration. Simply put, they’re not all that effective.

In the latest issue of the Journal of Political Marketing, four U.S. academics reported on some rigorous research they conducted into the influence of robocalls. The randomized field testing was carried out during a Texas Republican primary election in 2006, to gauge whether automated calls had any influence over turnout or voter preference.

I won’t go into the complicated methods or detailed findings here — suffice to say, the research found the robocalls pretty much useless.

“Despite the quality of the treatment and size of our experiments, we were unable to detect effects that were substantially large or statistically distinguishable from zero,” the researchers wrote in their journal article.

That finding echoed an observation made by Sasha Issenberg, author of The Victory Lab, when he spoke to a Toronto audience late last year. Issenberg, whose book documents the ways in which U.S. political parties are using big data to conduct their campaigns, was asked about robocalls during the question-and-answer session.

He scoffed at the whole enterprise. Issenberg said the only politicos who were relying on robocalls were the people who hadn’t read the political-science literature.

What may need more testing, however, is how robocalls work as a tool to suppress votes. Sure, they don’t make people any more likely to turn out at the polls, or vote for a particular party.

But they may just be annoying enough to turn people off politics or voting — and, from all accounts, that seemed to be the motive behind the rash of robocalls in the 2011 campaign. Robocalls are the political equivalent of telemarketers; the scourge of Canadian households, especially around dinnertime.

If you were trying to find a way to make people mad or cynical about politics, it would be hard to find a better medium than the irksome telephone.

Generations from now, schoolchildren may gather around the telephone exhibit in the Canadian Museum of History and learn of its inglorious demise in the early 21st century.

“Believe it or not, your ancestors used to believe that this instrument had magical powers to sell things,” the tour guide will say.

And when the children ask how their forebears became more enlightened, when the belief in that magic came to an end, the guide will answer: “When they stopped answering the phone.”

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